2024 Anne Hill Blanchard Uncommon Artists Lecture

March 3, 2024

From New York City to Bali, this year’s lecture will guide us through the unique trajectories of artists Janet Sobel, Curtis Cuffie and I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this program will highlight the contributions of self-taught artists in the field of modern and contemporary art.

Speakers include art historian and curator Natalie Dupêcher on new approaches to Janet Sobel’s abstraction, writer Ciarán Finlayson on Curtis Cuffie’s ephemeral “sculptures for space,” and art historian Wulan Dirgantoro on I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih’s grotesque female bodies. 

The Anne Hill Blanchard Uncommon Artists Lecture Series highlights new and important contributions to the field of folk and self-taught art. This annual series honors the late Anne Hill Blanchard, an inspiring and passionate leader in the field and a devoted supporter of the American Folk Art Museum.

About the Speakers:

Natalie Dupêcher is the Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection, Houston. In this capacity, she oversees the museum’s landmark holdings of historical Surrealism, in addition to mounting temporary exhibitions. She recently curated Janet Sobel: All-Over (2024) and Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition (2021-23), which was co-organized by the Menil Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Kunstmuseum Bern. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York. His writing on art and music has appeared in publications including Blank Forms, Artforum, Bookforum, Kunst und Politik, and in exhibition catalogs for museums including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy and the author of Perpetual Slavery, on the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon (Floating Opera, 2023).

Dr. Wulan Dirgantoro is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her publications including Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: Defining Experiences (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and “After 1965: Historical Violence and Strategies of Representation in Indonesian Visual Arts” in Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society and History (ANU Press, 2022).